Audience and the Rhetorical Situation
Alissa Quart divides the world of journalism into two parts: lost media and found media. My first thought: OK, this might be a useful, if typical, way of thinking about the (overly) general camps in which journalists (and journalism educators) find themselves today. But then I reached this moment in her essay and recognized something familiar:
Beneath the immediate professional anxiety, what profoundly troubles the people of Lost Media is that we feel as if we are on the brink of losing our “imagined communities,” the term Benedict Anderson used to describe publics that came to be through the common, general, circulation-enhancing “national print-languages.”
Found Media, on the other hand, tends to be unafraid and assured. Its avatars believe in creative destruction and distributed networks.
One thing I have never done–and it seems odd that I haven’t done so–is attempt a comprehensive description of the “general” rhetorical situation of journalism. I’ve written about it many times in bits and pieces on Rhetorica, but I have yet to pull it together.
Quickly and simplistically, “rhetorical situation” is the term for all the discussable aspects of the exigence, delivery, and reception of a message.
Who is the audience for journalism, and what exigence prompts journalists to attempt to communicate with that audience? I would urge journalists to resist a common-sense answer, e.g. “We cover news for citizens because they need it to be self-governing,” or “We communicate with a general or national audience in order to facilitate a common national discussion of events.” There are many others. What I want to know is: What do these answers mean in terms of actual individuals and/or groups who would use journalism for some purpose?
There is no general audience; that’s always been a convenient fiction. It is a fiction that used to work (financially more than communicatively I suspect)–at least for a period of time, roughly the most of the 20th century.
While the tradition and myth of individualism is strong in America, individuals tend to identify with (multiple) groups. Groups help provide a context of experience within which we may understand the events of the world. Ideology is group created and individually experienced. This is why no general audience exists.
The so-called found media (e.g. network news and large circulation newspapers) could thrive speaking to a general audience largely because these businesses made enough money to produce comprehensive products. As corporate owners began demanding 20-plus percent profit margins, the money and time to reach a general or national audience disappeared (i.e. no money to produce a comprehensive product). That’s just one part of it. And I’m not suggesting the problems of the MSM can be reduced to high profit margins.
Now, enter a new medium. This new medium allows something never before possible on a grand scale: The internet allows the audience to talk back and, more importantly, to talk to each other. This technology is teaching Americans to expect to be able to talk back and talk to each other. And it’s cheap, even free. Homeless people have blogs.
So bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”
The day interactivity was born was the day the general audience died. The rhetoric scholar part of me is entirely comfortable with this. But the journalist part of me is hanging on, knuckles white-hot, as this ride goes screaming down the tracks. It’s exciting precisely because it’s new, fun, and scary.
The question the found media need to answer is: Who am I talking to, and why am I trying to talk to them? No common-sense answers allowed.
I don’t want to harp on this, because I think it’s somewhat off your topic, but it’s also true that the “general audience” was never everybody, just everybody who counted. White people, or men, or white collar people, or educated people, or literate people, or people rich enough to have television sets. One of the things that has happened over the American Experiment is that the “general audience” has expanded to be much more heterogenous, and different techniques have been found to deal with that.
Who am I talking to, and why am I trying to talk to them? … and also who am I not talking to, and why am I not trying to talk to them?. If I can remember who they are.
Thanks,
-V.
V- Not at all off topic. A good observation, and I agree. I can only deal with so much per post
But I am planning to write that larger description of the rhetorical situation of journalism. And a more complex examination of audience will certainly play a role.
Thanks!
I find the Jeremiah Wright case an absolutely fascinating (and in some ways horrifying) case study in the evolving rhetorical situation.
It’s not just a matter of soundbites taken out of context and thrown via YouTube into the new media whirlwind. I’ve read dozens of articles and blog posts and haven’t come across one - not one - that accurately reflected the meaning of Wright’s 9/11 sermon. Most got it not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong.
Knee-jerk right-wingers, of course, deemed it an anti-American screed and celebration of terrorism based on the Malcolm X-ian “chicken coming home to roost” red herring. But lefties were just as bad, clumsily linking Wright to John Hagee’s fire and brimstone “God meets out justice on sinners.”
Some sympathetic lefties made inapt comparisons to Susan Sontag’s 9/11 comment, “an attack on the worldÂ’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.” Andrew Sullivan came closest in calling Wright’s sermon a “classic pacifist case.”
Being a white agnostic and never having stepped foot in South Chicago, I probably would have missed the meaning if I weren’t a Kierkegaardian (ironically, the same guy who said “the public” is a fantasy).
Wright’s treatment of Psalm 137 tipped me off. It’s usually used by preachers like Hagee as a justification for divinely sanctioned retaliatory violence “happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us/he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.” Wright turns it on its head, explaining that the human-created Bible is wrong: God is perfect in his love and does not sanction violence, no matter how righteous the retribution may appear to be. Revenge in an entirely human creation that only begets more violence because the other side is also going to claim divine righteousness.
Claiming divine blessing when killing human beings is blasphemy, period. ThatÂ’s why God “damns” America, which proclaims itseld a city upon a hill yet acts like Gomorrah. Pure, proto-existential Kierkegaard. Beautiful. As is the irony of an ignorant “public” judging Wright a simple-minded hatemonger.
This is also interesting.
Sven… Thanks for the link. Wright will be a dissertation for someone one of these days
Part of what you’re seeing is the triumph of punditry.
I suppose it’s always been tough for radicals (I’m reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, and it’s striking how every other word in the media was commie from circa 1952-1972).
But something about this case seemed especially pernicious to me. A sermon isn’t private, but it isn’t quite “public,” either. It’s as if the wider population was feasting on the congregation’s emotion like some twisted, brainsucking Star Trek alien. Bleh.